It’s good to be back. Summer vacations and baby deliveries are over, thank goodness. No but seriously, a break away from the norm was extremely good, and now we are psyched and pumped and ready to rock. Actually we’ve been back for a few weeks already, furiously working on the gameplay. I’m happy to say that we’re making good progress and will be showing gameplay before the year is over.

If all things go as planned (which they always do, especially in the gaming industry ), we are looking at a 2013 release. And we are preparing a crowdfunding project with some neat rewards for the last phase of the development. So all of you who have expressed the interest to become a part of this project and contribute can finally do so. But more on that when the time comes.

Enough blabbering, get back to work! (The voice inside my head is yelling, I must obey )

In this installment of In Praxis I’m going to talk about how we shade opaque surfaces. Beware of extremely technical mumbo-jumbo.

Reset has a fully deferred renderer, which means that all information required for lighting is first rendered into a set of screen-space textures (collectively called the G-buffer) and then lighting is applied using only those textures without the need to re-render the geometry. This provides a clean separation between materials and lights and allows for a slightly simpler design than traditional forward rendering. Also more exotic features such as deferred decals can be easily implemented. Read more

This article series concentrates on the technical side of the development. We start it with a look at the 3D content creation tool Blender and how we use it.

Why Blender you ask? I’ve previously worked with 3ds Max and XSI and found both packages to have their strengths and weaknesses. The XSI workflow suited me well and was planning to continue with it when we started on this project. The limited project budget however made me look at other options aswell. Did take a peek at Modo which looked promising and a few other smaller packages like 3DCoat. I had heard good things about Blender from different sources and decided to have a look at it also. Read more

Back from Norway, big thanks to Angela Amoroso, Kim Baumann Larsen and Eric Hanson for the great Digital Storytelling seminar!

Enough of that, let’s get down to business. Some of you have requested for a high quality downloadable version of the trailer and if you’re one of them, good news. You can download it from Game Front (521MB, 30Mbps Avi h.264) You are free to share it or post it on your site as long as you don’t alter the contents. You can however transcode it to a more user friendly size if posting somewhere online.

Work continues on the game, slowly but surely. Today we are starting the more technical oriented series of articles we promised. The series is called “In Praxis…”, clever huh

Settling back to normal work routine tastes good. Our asset importing/handling has gained new features and game design has taken steps forward with thoughts of communication methods between different temporal versions of Zero-Two. Very exciting stuff.

We’ve been invited to speak at Digital Storytelling seminar in Oslo, Norway next monday. We are honored to attend alongside Weta Digital and Fido. This short trip adds again a small bump to actual production work, but it’s definitely worth it.

Encouraging feedback still continues to roll in and one email we got from Jamie Counsell from Australia last week really stopped us on our tracks, in a good way. The reason is that the feeling we got while reading it was something that we couldn’t translate into words. We want to share that feeling and Jamie was extremely kind to let us publish the email. Till next week. (press “read more” to read the email)

What a week! We are completely and utterly taken by the feedback we’ve got from all of you guys. Over half a million views on different sites and just over 400K views on YouTube alone in one week! It’s beyond anything we hoped for, it’s bloody ridiculous. Like @TriniBoyD pointed out on twitter “All eyes on you guys now #nopressure”

Well, we are not pressured but 110% committed to finishing what we have started. It wasn’t a question before but seeing so many like-minded people out there gives us strength beyond strength. Seems that many of you are also throwing money at the screen, so we’re looking into crowdfunding to possibly materialize the game sooner rather than later.

And now that the smoke has started to settle there is still a lot of work to be done, so we best get to it. Till next week.

We are very proud to present the debut trailer for Reset. Everything you see in the trailer is straight from the in-game engine, no up-ressed textures, geometry or effects. What you see is what you will get. Except hopefully a little bit better since we’re not even in alpha yet. This is however a big milestone for us, and we are going to be concentrating more on the gameplay side of things next.

Although we’ve been quiet, we’re not dead. Far from it. We’ve been working hard to reach a major graphics milestone and on the teaser trailer which is also a test bed for all the features in the milestone. The release date for the trailer is April 25! \o/

To make things more real, here is a quick tour of our massive corporate headquarters and a screenshot of our editor. Enough talking, pics below:

In the beginning there was a thought: “There are these cool and mesmerizing indie movies like Moon and Cube with “small” budgets but seemingly big production values and essence ten times the amount of an average big budget blockbuster flick.” (Don’t get me wrong, we enjoy “blow’em all up”-actioners as much as the next guy, and the equivalent in games.) “But why aren’t there these popular indie -titles in the gaming space, we’d really like to play some”

Well the answer is a rather obvious one. Generalizing a bit, to create a believable fictional world on film, one basically does not need more than a camera. In games everything has to be built, which by today’s standards doesn’t come cheap.

Still the thought lingered. In the one hand a thought of a game with unsurpassed visual quality, a gripping game mechanic and a smart storyline diving into the deep end of a non-linear storytelling medium. And in the other a short story with temporal play written a few years back. Hmm, well whadda’ya know. They match! And not just match but intertwine meticulously wrapping itself in a tight ball of… something. Something unknown but very interesting, on paper anyway.

After that there was a discussion, which more or less went like this:

“But we need at least a budget of a gazillion bucks and ten truckloads of devs to pull this off, we don’t have that kind of money.”

“Yeah true, that is a major drag. But hey, I know, I have a great idea. What if we just ignore all that?”

“Hey that’s an excellent idea!”

And here we are.

Wrapped meticulously in a ball of… something! How will our dynamic duo start to unwrap themselves from its tight grip? Tune in next week, same Reset-time, same Reset-channel!

*Disclamer: Reset time might be different next week*

Oh almost forgot to mention, we are working on a teaser trailer, which is nearly complete. Keep your pantyhose on